Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel)

by Malliet, G. M.

  “As I say, distinctive they were, those earrings—one of a kind. Literally, one of a kind. I recognized the design immediately. For I had seen them before, in another photograph.

  “And who would wear one earring? It had to be one of the set.

  “Where had she gotten them, this woman? How had she come by them? I had to come to Nether Monkslip to find out. Of course I knew of the place already because of Lucie—another sign it was, that she was also in this photo. An unmistakable sign. I hadn’t seen her in years, but still I could tell it was Lucie sitting at that table, and even though his face was blurry, it had to be Frank beside her.

  “I had to get here, and see for myself, and find out where the other woman in the photo, their dinner companion, had gotten those earrings.

  “For they had been my mother’s, those earrings.

  “And they had been intended for me.

  “I had to see them up close. I had to investigate. I had to know what happened.

  “It took only moments of online detective work to find out he’d moved here, that he actually lived here, and hadn’t just been visiting on the night the photo was taken. He kept making announcements to the media about what he was going to do, that he was going to retire, so learning more about his life was easy.

  “And once I knew where to find him … well. I put my plan in motion. I called Lucie, who offered me a place to stay. I encountered no difficulty in finding work in Nether Monkslip, especially with Lucie to vouch for me with Annette. All my qualifications were in order.

  “I am, of course, not really Lucie’s aunt. Lucie’s mother was an orphan, raised in the same orphanage as I was. When you have no people of your own, you adopt others quickly into your life. You call them ‘cousin’ or ‘sister’ or anything that makes you feel you are a little bit a part of this world. Anything that makes you feel less alone.

  “So, her mother and I were raised together by the Sisters of St. Ardelle. You could say we all raised one another. There were so many of us girls without a real home or family.”

  She was silent so long, Max wasn’t sure she would speak again. Finally, he returned her to the present tale. “The earrings?” he asked.

  With a visible effort, she said, “Yes, of course. The earrings.

  “The thing you need to understand is this: There was no way anyone had come by them honestly. They were mine. They were intended for me alone. My first step became to find out exactly how Melinda—for it was Melinda in the photo, of course, as I readily learned from Lucie—how she’d come to possess them.

  “Once I had packed up and moved and settled myself in Nether Monkslip, I set about learning all I could about the Bottles. With one salon in the village, it was perhaps only a matter of time before Melinda became my client, but I was, of course, more “proactive,” as they say, than that. I cultivated her; I earned her trust, which was not difficult—Melinda desperately needed someone to talk to.

  “Even as I began gaining her confidence, I told myself I had come to grips with the past and that I was just satisfying my curiosity. That I had put aside all thoughts of revenge. But once I had confirmed to whom Melinda was married, and of course when I actually met the egomaniac, all of that vanished. On the instant, it vanished.

  “A pompous little boy had grown to be a pompous, self-important, and petty little man who belittled and mistreated almost everyone who crossed his path.

  “Do you believe we change, Father? Of course you do—you must believe, in your line of work. But you’d be wrong about that. We don’t. People don’t.

  “Anyway, there he was. I wanted to make sure he hadn’t, by some miracle, changed—I was trying to play fair; isn’t that a joke?—but of course he was just what you’d expect of a snitch. A cowardly, pompous braggart, bullying his sad little wife. I did feel sorry for Melinda: so much younger than he, filling her days with shopping and an affair—someone to pass the lonely hours with. A bit of intrigue in an empty life of playing handmaiden to the Great Thespian.

  “How do I know all this? She told me. I cultivated her; you see how I cultivated her: I needed to know her and him and their habits as a married couple.

  “I learned from Melissa how Thaddeus had come to be in England: He was adopted out of France by the Bottles, when his own parents were killed in a car accident just as the war ended. Later, Thaddeus—or ‘Thaddee,’ as he was originally known—left the village and the Bottles behind for a career in London. I gather the Bottles had by this time come to realize they had taken a viper into their nest. Just as in the Aesop’s fable about the snake that was saved from freezing but bit the farmer who had saved him.

  “Anyway, the rest, as Thaddeus would be the first to say, is theatrical history. Of course, most traces of accent had been sanded away with the years and the stage training, but he spoke the sort of excellent French you learn at your mother’s knee—I heard him as we all did, speaking with Lucie. Even the little dog Jean, so Melinda told me, was named for Jean Cocteau.

  “Of course it was little Jean Cocteau that allowed me to go to and from the house with ease: The Bottles’ dog didn’t bark because it knew me. I went there all the time and I would slip the dog a little treat, so it got used to me.”

  “Why were you there so much?” Max asked. “Surely Melinda went to your shop to have her hair done.”

  She held up a forestalling hand. “I will tell you why, Father. I will tell you. I will tell you all of it.

  “You could not have failed to have noticed how vain Thaddeus was about his appearance. He’d had at least two face-lifts—a hairdresser can always tell. And he dyed his hair. Of course he dyed his hair.

  “Do you remember that old advertising slogan—‘Only your hairdresser knows for sure’? I was sworn to secrecy. He was so vain! He would stop by the shop for a haircut, but he’d pay me extra to go to the house on evenings when Melinda wasn’t there. It’s not unusual for people who can afford it to have these sessions in their homes, and of course Thaddeus was used to having this sort of personal treatment. So I’d go over there to the house once a month, like clockwork, to do his hair in private. If I do say it myself, I’m very good at what I do. No one could tell.

  “And while I was there, of course I took the opportunity one evening to take back the earrings he had stolen. They were in Melinda’s jewelry box, in the bedroom—I would do his hair in the master bathroom. I was careful never to wear them around her—anyway, I wasn’t interested so much in wearing them as taking back possession of what was mine. What had been left for me.

  “So on the night he was killed, he had invited me to the house for our regular monthly top secret appointment. Melinda was not at home on these occasions, and she was of course only too happy to oblige. I honestly think it never occurred to Thaddeus that she might be cheating on him. That blinding ego at work again.

  “This particular night, the night I killed him, Father … This particular night I dyed and washed and blow-dried his hair as I always did, and when I had finished, I took the brush I’d used to apply the hair dye, pretending to do a little touch-up on his roots at the back of his neck, where I’d missed a spot, and I dipped the brush in poison. I painted the strophanthin, which is brown in color, like the hair dye, into the little nick I’d ‘accidentally’ made in his neck a few days previously, while I was cutting his hair.

  “That was all it took. The merest dab. Of course it stung. It was meant to. He complained loudly, so I pretended to wipe the residue away. But he didn’t complain for long. It’s an extremely fast-acting poison.

  “It is not a painless death, and given the small amount I’d used, it wasn’t fast, either. It wasn’t meant to be fast. I waited and watched to make sure the poison worked. To make sure he died, Father.

  “I had already given him a sedative—I put it in the whiskey he always drank while I worked on him. I’d borrowed the sedative from the medicine cabinet on a previous visit, and I used it now so he wouldn’t have time or strength to fight me or call for hel
p. It wasn’t as if I’d had a lot of experience with this, and I had to be sure nothing went wrong.

  “I needn’t have bothered, really. The poison rendered him helpless almost immediately. You would think the sight of this helpless old man would have softened my heart. I will not pretend and tell you that it did.

  “I had wanted him to know it was me who had done this to him, and why, but then I realized it would be like explaining algebra to a zebra: He couldn’t begin to understand that what he had done was wrong, nor could he be made to care. Thaddeus, even as a child, suffered from an extreme arrogance that made him think he was above the rest.

  “I want to tell you everything now, Father Max. I think I wanted to tell you all along.”

  “The Bible verses through the letter slot…”

  She nodded. “Writing those was like a safety valve. And I think in a way I was hoping you’d guess it was me. But then…”

  “But then it all became too big a secret to keep. Difficult for you, impossible for Melinda.”

  She nodded. “Well, there you have it, Father, or most of it. I had only to get him out of the chair and into bed. Not too difficult for someone like me. I have kept myself strong. I am strong, and he was old now. It was a reversal of our conditions when he betrayed me. I was a helpless baby then. Now he was helpless. Don’t you think it fitting?

  “I waited calmly to make sure he was dead. I surprised myself. I was not bothered at all by what I had done, at least not then.”

  “But you do regret it now, don’t you, Gabby?” Max asked quietly. It was not curiosity that made him ask. It was a condition of the Rite of Reconciliation that she regret what she had done.

  She looked at him a long time, understanding his meaning. At last, she nodded her head ever so slightly. But she would not meet his eyes.

  “Let me tell you,” she said. “Let me tell you all of it. Then you’ll see. I think you’ll see. It’s Melinda—it’s what happened with Melinda that changed everything.

  “I think all would have been well if not for Melinda.

  “I was just getting ready to place the body on the bed—it was meant to look like a heart attack, like he’d simply collapsed—when Melinda came home early. She’d already set her watch ahead for the time change, you see, but I had not done so. It was ten P.M. by her watch, but nine P.M. by mine.

  “She’d been with Farley, of course. She’d briefly joined the Writers’ Square back when it met on Saturdays, to establish an alibi so she could be with Farley. When the group stopped meeting on Saturdays and switched to Thursdays—at first she wasn’t aware of the change, but then she realized Thaddeus didn’t pay a lot of attention anyway to what she got up to. Other times, Melinda would tell him she was at the movies in Staincross Minster with a girlfriend—something like that. Either he trusted her or he didn’t care.

  “She did tell me at one point that Thaddeus had become suspicious and for a while her life was even more difficult than before. That is why—well, somehow, things kept arranging themselves so that it was easier for her to see the value in ridding the world of him. By this point, I had become her complete confidante, you see. Her accomplice.

  “I knew all about Farley, and I used to help Melinda by changing the bedroom clock before I left Thaddeus, so he would not be aware of how late it was getting. His memory was not what it had been, which helped with that particular deception.

  “Melinda would change the clock back on her arrival home or even the next morning. This would buy her an extra hour. But the time change threw a spanner into the works.

  “Anyway, she came home and found me arranging the body in what I hoped would be an artful, believable pose. At first I was afraid she would raise the alarm, but of course she did not. I had seen her collecting poison mushrooms in Raven’s Wood; I knew already what she was thinking, what she most wished for. She just took in the scene, hesitated a fraction of a second, and then walked over and helped me position him half on and half off the bed.

  “I had done her a favor, and she knew that. I’d done the whole world a favor. She didn’t even ask why, not until later. I simply told her that decades before he had betrayed me and my family. She accepted this unblinkingly. She knew perfectly well what kind of monster she was married to, you see.

  “So even though she didn’t know at first why I’d done it, she felt only relief that I had. I’d done what she’d not yet worked up the courage to do.

  “She helped me pack up my gear—the towels and hair dryer and so on. When I got home, I burned the brush I’d used to apply the poison in the fireplace, and the gloves. Of course I wore gloves—I always do when dealing with chemicals, but especially this time. For that is a poison not to fool about with, especially if you have even a tiny cut on your hands, as people in my line of work often do.

  “We left him there in the bedroom and went to the kitchen. Over a drink, we put our heads together and came up with a cover story. Melinda would pretend to have fallen asleep downstairs watching the telly and to have gone up to bed very early the next morning to find him. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence in that household. Thaddeus was fussy about his ‘beauty sleep,’ as he called it, and would go to bed early. He had his little routine. And of course Melinda had hers.

  She and I turned on the telly so that, if asked, Melinda could say what shows had been on before she fell asleep. My alibi was the same—that I had been watching the telly in my flat over the shop. It wasn’t perfect, but who would ever suspect me? And if it came to that, and she was officially accused, the plan was for me to alibi Melinda—I would suddenly ‘remember’ that she’d dropped by to return something and we’d watched a show together. But for the present, we decided to keep it simple. The truth, that she had been with Farley much of the evening, might also suffice. Better an adulteress than an accessory to murder.”

  At last Gabby looked straight at him.

  “Strophanthin,” said Max. “Of all things. You must have brought it back from Africa.”

  “That’s right. My husband and I, as I told you, were missionaries for many years. The poison wasn’t difficult to come by in tropical Africa, and I held on to it when we left.”

  “Why did you? Why did you keep it?”

  “Think about it, Father. It’s not the kind of thing you can just toss out anywhere, is it? The smallest drop will kill quickly, which is of course why it was so useful in warfare. The poison-tipped arrow is not the stuff of fiction, but of fact.

  “And maybe … since this is my confession, I will confess: Maybe in my heart I always hoped I’d be able to use it on someone as deserving as Thaddeus Bottle. It was the purest luck I came across the actual criminal, the one who mattered most to me. There were so many betrayers from those days, some still at large, and never brought to justice.”

  Max had surmised that since she had been a baby at the time of Thaddeus’s betrayal, “those days” could only be the days of World War II. And she was right: So few had been brought to justice.

  “So I had the means,” Gabby said, “but I puzzled long and hard over the delivery. How to make sure Thaddeus suffered a cut, so I could then somehow insert the poison into his bloodstream? I work with scissors all day, and I thought of trying to entice him into my chair. A little slip of the blade, a little poison on the blade, and … done. But that would be a dead giveaway, wouldn’t it—if you will please excuse the pun? To have him die literally at my hands? So I thought, and I thought some more. How I could pierce his skin, so he wouldn’t even realize. I could have him cut himself on something coated with the poison. I thought of a lightbulb shattering in his hand, something like that.

  “And then I realized the two events didn’t have to occur together. I could wound him slightly with my scissors. Then I could put poison into the wound, even a day or two later. The beauty of that was that one event need not be connected with the other. No one need suspect there was poisoning involved at all. No one except you, Father Max.

  “Of course, what is truly
unforgivable is what I did to Melinda. She was unstable at the best of times, and she did have that tendency to prattle on, letting the cat out of the bag. Melinda wasn’t the type to stay silent forever with what she knew or suspected; she was anyone’s last choice for a partner in crime. And when all was said and done, I did want to get away with it—at least, at first. I wanted to live.

  “I’d saved the mushrooms I’d caught her collecting that day, and dried them in the oven. I guess I thought of it as my backup plan for killing Thaddeus. Whatever it took, I would succeed in killing him.

  “I made individual small pies and gave Melinda the one I knew was poisoned. It took effect surprisingly fast—drying the mushrooms must have concentrated their potency.” She added quickly, “Awena was never in danger, Father Max. Please believe that. But my attempt to kill Melinda, even though immediately regretted, was wrong. And for that, I truly am sorry.

  “I wouldn’t have called the ambulance right away if I’d really wanted Melinda to die—now would I?”

  “The worst of it is, the confusing thing is: I didn’t count on caring so much that an innocent person might become a suspect. That innocent people would be caught up in this. I didn’t think beyond ridding the world of Thaddeus. But I think that’s partly what tripped me up. Good old-fashioned Catholic guilt: the nuns’ specialty.”

  “Caring about the innocent—that will be your saving grace in this,” said Max. “You do see that, don’t you?”

  But again she might not have heard. “I kept some of the arrow poison back, not using all of it. Just in case, you see. If I were found out, I would end it. I had already made up my mind about that. I would see Thaddeus Bottle in hell, then.”

  “Gabby,” Max said sharply. “If that still is your intention, then it—”

  Quickly she shook her head. “Don’t worry, Father. It was, as I say, ‘just in case.’ I don’t think I have the nerve.